Octopuses are the closest things to real-life aliens we’ve ever encountered. The more we learn about them, the stranger they reveal themselves to be. For instance, a new study published in the journal Science revealed some fascinating tidbits on how octopuses have sex, and it is, appropriately, rather freaky.
Researchers found that male octopuses can locate and mate with females without ever seeing them, a process they call “taste by touch.” They rely on a chemical detection system embedded in their arms. That means when they have sex, they’re wildly waving their arms around, hoping to get a feel for what’s in front of them the way you do when trying to walk through your apartment after your power goes out.
They do this with a specialized arm called the hectocotylus, an organ used to transfer sperm. That might make it sound as though it has a clear, distinct usage, but scientists still didn’t fully understand this appendage until recently. What they didn’t fully grasp is that this same arm also acts as a sensory tool that’s capable of detecting chemical signals, specifically the hormone progesterone released by females.
In controlled experiments, males were separated from females by barriers. They couldn’t see each other. They couldn’t fully touch. Yet the males consistently extended their hectocotylus through small openings, located the female’s mantle cavity, and completed mating. When researchers swapped the female for tubes coated in progesterone, the males responded almost identically, attempting to mate with what was essentially a decoy made to smell like a mate, like spraying some perfume on a sex doll.
One bit of pre-existing octopus knowledge this research confirms is that octopus arms contain thousands of delicate, highly sensitive sensory cells. A large portion of an octopus’s neurons are distributed along its limbs rather than being centralized in the brain like they are in us. That means his arm isn’t just following orders from the brain; it is the brain, and it’s actively sensing, decoding, and doing its own thing. In a sense, you could say that octopuses are kind of all brain.
The study’s findings even got quite disturbing when the researchers found that male octopuses’ drive to mate with wherever it was detecting progesterone was so intense that it kept reaching out for the chemical even after it had been severed. That’s a horror movie premise about ever heard one.
The researchers theorize that the evolutionary advantage of this kind of system lies in the octopus’s solitary lifestyle and aversion to encounters with any other creatures, including females. They don’t want to deal with any other living thing for too long, so they’ve evolved a system that allows rapid identification and reproduction with minimal interaction.
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